Still trying to chase down results in key legislative races around the country, but at the moment it looks like this:

• Going into the 2010 elections, Democrats held 60 partisan legislative chambers and Republicans held 36, with a couple of ties.

• It looks like the GOP has picked up an astounding 20 chambers, including both houses in Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin and additional chambers in Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

• In total legislative seats, it is possible that after all the results are posted, Republicans will have won a nationwide majority.

• Republicans haven’t enjoyed this much power in state capitals since the 1920s.

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We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment. But the popular uproar pales in comparison to the sense of humiliation that we Americans are quite broke.

In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush, not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits.

The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration, and despite six years of an allegedly small-government Republican Congress, the deficit nearly doubled from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion in just eight years.

Barack Obama apparently never figured out that he had been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people.

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During a recent press conference, President Obama blamed George W. Bush for the nation’s fiscal condition. “When I walked in,” he declared, “wrapped in a nice bow was a $1.3 trillion deficit sitting right there on my doorstep.” Earlier this year he asserted that “we came in with $8 trillion worth of debt over the next decade.”

Neither statement is correct, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). True enough, the outgoing Bush administration bequeathed big deficits to Mr. Obama. The expected 2009 deficit was $1.19 trillion, not $1.3 trillion, however—and the actual deficit for 2009 came in at $1.41 trillion, meaning that the new president added some $220 billion to the total.

Far more significant, however, was the president’s misstatement that Mr. Bush and the Republicans left the country with $8 trillion of debt over the next 10 years.

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One line of thought holds that Democrats are sinking fast enough on their own, so let them. Just get out of the way and let the weight of their Big Government policies, propounded during nearly four years controlling Congress and nearly two years running everything in Washington, do its thing.

The other argument is that Republicans, in asking Americans to hand them congressional control, or at least a piece of it, must say what they would do with that control. The GOP fell short the last time it was in charge, so it’s obligated to detail how things would be different if given another shot.

Thus, the document Republicans produced last week walks a narrow line. It’s not a campaign platform or a legislative blueprint. It’s more a statement of philosophical conviction and direction — one that mostly succeeds in assuring voters that Republicans have heard their demand for a stop to the Democrats’ agenda of increased spending, higher taxes and expansion of federal reach into their everyday lives.

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On Friday, Ms. Murkowski let it be known that she would conduct a write-in campaign for the Alaskan Senate seat against Joe Miller, the tea party favorite who toppled her fair and square in the Republican primary last month. Senate incumbents are always hard to beat, especially in a state like Alaska that has long rewarded seniority, and we assume voters understood the choice.

Though Ms. Murkowski heavily outspent the West Point grad, decorated veteran and federal magistrate, she said over the weekend on CNN that Mr. Miller had only prevailed because of “lies and fabrications and mischaracterization.” She then denounced the “pretty radical things” that the Republican nominee supposedly supports, including “You know, we dump Social Security. No more Medicare. Let’s get rid of the Department of Education. Elimination of all earmarks. You know, he is—he has taken an approach that is just, plain and simple, more radical than where the people of the state of Alaska are.”

If Ms. Murkowski isn’t taking orders from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, it’s hard to tell.

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A new comprehensive national survey shows that independent voters—who voted for Barack Obama by a 52%-to-44% margin in the 2008 presidential election—are now moving strongly in the direction of the Republican Party. The survey, conducted by Douglas E. Schoen LLC on behalf of Independent Women’s Voice in late August, raises the possibility of a fundamental realignment of independent voters and the dominance of a more conservative electorate.

Today, independents say they lean more toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, 50% to 25%, and that the Republican Party is closer to their views by 52% to 30%. This movement comes in spite of independents’ generally negative views of the GOP—a majority of independents (54%) view the Republicans unfavorably, compared to 39% who have a favorable impression. (The poll also revealed that 48% of independents were either “sympathetic to or supporters of the tea party.”)

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It doesn’t happen very often. They hold onto power like they cling to life itself.

Yet, already this year, it appears three sitting U.S. senators have been shown the door — in primary elections, by their own parties, no less: First came Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Robert Bennett, R-Utah — who actually came in third in his state GOP convention.

Now it appears Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has been upended by conservative upstart Joe Miller.

Headlines have credited — or “blamed” — Sarah Palin and voter “rage” — as if voters are merely throwing tantrums and are being led around by the nose. Some in the media also want to characterize it all as a civil war in the Republican Party.

We think voters are smarter than that. We think voters know precisely what they’re doing.

We think it’s the beginning of an uprising.

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The biggest shock came in Alaska, with incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski trailing unheralded challenger Joe Miller by roughly 1,700 votes with as many as 16,000 absentee ballots still to be counted. As a West Point grad, decorated Gulf War veteran and federal magistrate, Mr. Miller is no lightweight. But he was facing one of Alaska’s great family names, part of the GOP establishment that has dominated the state since it joined the union.

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Here’s the answer suggested by last Thursday’s semi-annual budget summary from the Congressional Budget Office: Stop spending so much.

CBO’s mid-year review largely reinforces the bad news we already knew—to wit, that spending has exploded since Democrats took over Congress in 2007, first with the acquiescence of George W. Bush and then into hyperdrive after Mr. Obama entered the White House.

To appreciate the magnitude of this spending blowout, compare CBO’s budget “baseline” estimate in January 2008 with the baseline it released Thursday. The baseline predicts future spending based on the law at the time. As the nearby chart shows, in a mere 31 months Congress has added more than $4.4 trillion to the 10-year spending baseline. The 2008 and 2009 numbers are actual spending, the others are estimates. As recently as 2005, total federal spending was only $2.47 trillion.

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